Terms and conditions of use

Welcome to our digital information network. These are our terms and conditions for use of the network, which you may access in several ways, including but not limited to the World Wide Web via www.chineseportal.net, digital television, PDA, mobile phone and RSS feeds. In these terms and conditions, when we say the “Chinese Portal Site" we mean the digital information network operated by or on behalf of Phoenix Metro Media Ltd or its parent companies, subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively "Chinese Portal"), regardless of how you access the network, as well as any Chinese Portal apps whether you access those via a Chinese Portal Site or a third party site. However you access the Chinese Portal Site, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions. If you have accessed the Chinese Portal Site from the United States or Australia, you also agree to be bound by additional terms contained at the end of these terms and conditions.

1. Registration

You may access areas of the Chinese Portal Site that require registration by becoming a registered member and creating an account with us. You agree to be responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your passwords or other account identifiers which you choose and all activities that occur under your account.

By registering on the Chinese Portal Site, you agree that:

(i)your account and password are personal to you and may not be used by anyone else to access the Chinese Portal Site;

(ii)you will not do anything which would assist anyone who is not a registered user to gain access to any registration area of the Chinese Portal Site; and

(iii)you will not create registration accounts for the purpose of abusing the functionality of the site, or other users; nor will you seek to pass yourself off as another user.

You agree to notify us immediately if you become aware any unauthorised use of your password or account identifiers by others.

2. Termination of registration

If you no longer wish to have a registered account, you may terminate your account by sending an email to info@chineseportal.net. If you no longer accept these terms and conditions, or any future modification to these terms and conditions, you must cease using the Chinese Portal Site. Continued use of the Chinese Portal Site indicates your continued acceptance of these terms and conditions.

If, for any reason, we believe that you have not complied with these terms and conditions, we may, at our sole discretion, cancel your access to the registration areas of Chinese Portal Site immediately and without prior notice.

We may terminate your registered account, at our sole discretion, by emailing you at the address you have registered stating that the agreement has terminated.

3. Use of material appearing on the Chinese Portal Site

Your use of the Chinese Portal Site is for your own personal and non-commercial use only. You acknowledge that, as between Chinese Portal and you, except for user content and advertisements (as discussed below), Chinese Portal is the sole owner of all content on the Chinese Portal Site, including, without limitation, all applicable copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, trade names, logos, and other intellectual property rights thereto, as well as text, images, graphics, logos, audio, video and other material appearing on the Chinese Portal Site ("Chinese Portal Content"). The Chinese Portal Site and the Chinese Portal Content are protected by the copyright laws and other intellectual property laws of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia and are protected globally by applicable international copyright treaties.

You may download and print extracts from the Chinese Portal Content for your own personal and non-commercial use only, provided you maintain and abide by any author attribution, copyright or trademark notice or restriction in any material that you download or print. You may not use any Chinese Portal Content for any other purpose without our prior written approval. Except as expressly authorised by the Chinese Portal, you are not allowed to create a database in electronic or paper form comprising all or part of the material appearing on the Chinese Portal Site.

If you wish to use our content other than as permitted by these terms and conditions, please contact info@chineseportal.net.

For all other inquiries about distribution or reproduction of the materials, please contact info@chineseportal.net.

4. Disclaimer of liability

To the extent permitted at law, we do not accept any responsibility for any statement in the Chinese Portal Content. Nothing in the Chinese Portal Content is provided for any specific purpose or at the request of any particular person. For the avoidance of confusion, we will not be liable for any loss caused as a result of your doing, or not doing, anything as a result of viewing, reading or listening to the Chinese Portal Content or any part of it. You can access other sites via links from the Chinese Portal Site. These sites are not under our control and we are not responsible in any way for any of their contents.

We give no warranties of any kind concerning the Chinese Portal Site or the Chinese Portal Content. In particular, we do not warrant that the Chinese Portal Site or any of its contents is virus free. You must take your own precautions in this respect as we accept no responsibility for any infection by virus or other contamination or by anything which has destructive properties.

Although we will do our best to provide constant, uninterrupted access to the Chinese Portal Site, we do not guarantee this. We accept no responsibility or liability for any interruption or delay.

If you are accessing the Chinese Portal Site from the United States or Australia, the additional disclaimers and limitations of liability in Sections 16 and 17 and apply.

5. Third party advertising on the Chinese Portal Site

You will see advertising material submitted by third parties on the Chinese Portal Site. Each individual advertiser is solely responsible for the content of its advertising material. We accept no responsibility for the content of advertising material, including, without limitation, any error, omission or inaccuracy therein.

If you want to advertise on the Chinese Portal Site, please email the sales team.

6. User content

Users of our site may be permitted to submit content for publication in various areas of the Chinese Portal Site. You will be deemed to consent to these guidelines, and these terms and conditions, if you choose to post any content or comments to the Chinese Portal Site.

When you submit content to us, you agree and represent that you have created that content, or you have received permission from, or are authorised by, the owner of any part of the content to submit it to the Chinese Portal Site.

You or the owner of the content still own the copyright in the content sent to us, but by submitting content to us, you are granting us an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully transferable, perpetual worldwide licence to use, publish and/or transmit, and to authorise third-parties to use, publish and/or transmit your content in any format and on any platform, either now known or hereinafter invented.

You acknowledge and agree that when you post content on the Chinese Portal Site or view content provided by others, you are doing so at your own discretion and risk, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, of that content. You further acknowledge and agree that the views expressed by you and other users in that content do not necessarily reflect the views of Chinese Portal, and we do not support or endorse any user content. You acknowledge that we have no obligation to pre-screen, monitor, review, or edit any content posted by you and other users on the Chinese Portal Site.

We, or authorised third parties, reserve the right to cut, crop, edit or refuse to publish, your content at our or their sole discretion. We may remove your content from use at any time.

We accept no liability in respect of any content submitted by users and published by us or by authorised third parties.

You warrant that the content you submit to us is not obscene, threatening, harassing, libellous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of another's privacy, offensive, defamatory of any person or illegal. You warrant that the content you submit to us does not infringe any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other intellectual or proprietary or privacy right of any party or individual.

You agree not to

(i)post content which is deliberately intended to upset or harm other users;

(ii)use the Chinese Portal Site to post or otherwise transmit content that victimises, harasses, degrades, or intimidates an individual or group of individuals on the basis of any impermissible classification, including, without limitation, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, colour, creed, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, military status or disability;

(iii)post or otherwise transmit any content that contains software viruses or any other computer code, files, or programs designed to interrupt, destroy, or limit the functionality of the Chinese Portal Site or any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment;

(iv)upload or otherwise transmit any content, or take any other actions with respect to your use of the Chinese Portal Site, that would constitute, or would otherwise encourage, criminal conduct or give rise to civil liability; or

(v)use the Chinese Portal Site for commercial purposes, including, without limitation, submitting any material to solicit funds or to promote, advertise or solicit the sale of any goods or services.

You understand that the technical processing and transmission of the Chinese Portal Site may involve

(i)transmissions over various networks; and

(ii)changes to content to conform and adapt to technical requirements of connecting networks or devices.

Chinese Portal assumes no responsibility for the deletion or failure to store postings of content or other information submitted by you or other users to the Chinese Portal Site.

If you are under 16, you confirm that you have permission of your parent or guardian to submit content.

Any queries regarding copyright and your content should be directed in the first instance to info@chineseportal.net.

7. Apps

You may download certain Chinese Portal apps ("Apps") either from Chinese Sites or from third party app stores or shops. All of these terms apply to the maximum extent relevant to your use of the Apps (and in particular, the terms of section 6 apply where you are using an App to submit user content to the Chinese Portal Sites).

In addition to the limitations on our liability set out in Section 4, 16 and 17, we shall not be liable for any damage caused to or interference with any equipment or other Apps or content of any description.

8. Data protection

Please see our privacy policy for details of how personally identifiable information is collected and may be processed or shared with others.

9. Changes to these terms and conditions of use

Please note that we may change these terms and conditions from time to time at our sole discretion and we reserve the right to do without your consent. Any revised terms and conditions will be applicable at the time of posting on the Chinese Portal Site. Please ensure that you review these terms and conditions regularly as you will be deemed to have accepted a variation if you continue to use the Chinese Portal Site after it has been posted.

10. Governing law & jurisdiction (except for US users)

These terms and conditions are governed by English law and the parties agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.

11. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Chinese Portal, its parents, subsidiaries, and affiliates, and each of their respective officers, directors, and employees from any and all claims, liabilities, costs, and expenses, including, but not limited to, attorneys' fees and expenses, arising out a breach by you or any user of your account of these terms and conditions or privacy policy or arising out of a breach of your obligations, representation and warranties under these terms and conditions.

12. No waiver

Our failure to insist upon or enforce any provision of these terms of service shall not be construed as a waiver of any provision or right of Chinese Portal.

Additional terms of use for users in the United States and Australia

13. Additional restrictions on user content for US users

In addition to section 6 the terms in Section above, you agree not to use the Chinese Portal Site to upload, post, e-mail, or otherwise transmit any content that you do not have a right to transmit under any law or regulation or under any contractual or fiduciary relationship (such as insider information, intellectual, proprietary or confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements and to intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national, or international law, including, but not limited to, regulations promulgated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any rules of any national or other securities exchange, including, without limitation, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, or the NASDAQ, and any rules, regulations, orders, directives and the like having the force of law).

14. DMCA notice for US users

If you are a US copyright owner or an agent of a US copyright owner and believe that any user content or other content on the Chinese Portal Site infringes upon your copyrights, you may submit a notification pursuant to Title 17, United States Code, Section 512(c)(3), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") by providing our designated copyright agent with the following information in writing:

(i)identification of the copyrighted work or works claimed to have been infringed;

(ii)identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material;

(iii)your contact information including name a address, telephone number, and, if available, an email address;

(iv)a statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the owner of the work, its agent, or the law;

(v)a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed; and

(vi)your physical or electronic signature;

Only DMCA notices should go to the designated copyright agent. You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with all of the requirements of this Section, your DMCA notice may not be valid.

15. Governing law & jurisdiction (for US users)

If you have accessed the Chinese Portal Site from the US, these terms and conditions are governed by the laws of the United States of America and the laws of the State of New York. You agree that exclusive jurisdiction for any claim or dispute with Chinese Portal or relating in any way to your use of the Chinese Portal Site resides in the courts of the County of New York, State of New York, and you further agree and expressly consent to the exercise of personal jurisdiction in the courts of the County of New York, State of New York, in connection with any such dispute and including any claim involving Phoenix Metro Media Ltd or its affiliates, subsidiaries, employees, contractors, officers, directors, telecommunication providers and content providers. You agree that any cause of action or claim that you may have with respect to your use of the Chinese Portal Site must be commenced within one year after the act or omission giving rise to the claim or cause of action arose.

16. Additional disclaimers

Visitors to the Chinese Portal Site agree that their use of the Chinese Portal Site is at their own sole risk. The Chinese Portal Site is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranty of any kind, either express or implied including but not limited to:

(i)any warranties concerning the availability, accuracy, appropriateness, reliability, timeliness, or usefulness of the content of the Chinese Portal Site; and

(ii)any warranties of title, warranty of non-infringement, or warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Chinese Portal also makes no representations and warranties as to any linked sites and Chinese Portal has no liability or responsibility with respect to your use of such sites. In some instances, content made available on the Chinese Portal Site may represent the opinions and judgments of providers or users, such as user content. Chinese Portal and its affiliates do not endorse nor shall they be responsible or liable for the accuracy or reliability of any statement made on the Chinese Portal Site by anyone other than authorised Chinese Portal employees acting in such capacity.

This disclaimer of liability applies to any damages or injuries caused by the Chinese Portal Site, including, without limitation, those damages or injuries occurring as a result of:

(i)any error, omission, deletion, or defect in the content available on the Chinese Site; or

(ii)any failure of performance, error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, computer virus, communication line failure, theft or destruction of records, information or data, unauthorised access to, alteration of, or use of records, information or data, whether for breach of contract, tort, negligence, defamation, or any other cause of action. Chinese Portal does not warrant or guarantee that access to the Chinese Portal Site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Applicable law may not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so the above exclusion may not apply to you.

17. Limitation of liability

you acknowledge and agree that, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, regardless of the form of action, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, in no event will chinese portal or its affiliates, including, without limitation, their respective officers, directors, employees, successors and assigns, be liable to you or any other party for any direct or indirect loss, damage, cost, expense or liability of any kind ("loss") arising in any way out of or in connection with the availability, use, reliance on, or inability to use the chinese portal site, including (without limitation):

(I) damages for business interruption, loss of business and other profits, loss of programs, cost of replacing equipment or software or loss of records, information or data, loss of use of data, loss of revenue, loss of goodwill, loss of customers, loss of or damage to reputation, loss of capital, downtime costs, loss under or in relation to any other contract, or loss of anticipated savings or benefits;

(III) any loss attributable to errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies in the chinese portal site. the exclusion of liability in this section 17 applies even if chinese portal shall have been advised of the possibility of such loss.

because som states or jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of liability for particular kinds of loss, in such states or jurisdictions, chinese portal’s liability shall be limited to the extent permitted by law (thereby minimizing chinese portal's liability to you to the lowest amount that applicable law permits).

18. Exclusion of warranties (for Australian users)

The Australian Consumer Law may confer certain rights and remedies on you in relation to the provision by Chinese Portal of goods and services under these terms and conditions. Notwithstanding the disclaimers and limitations of liability in Sections 4, 16 and 17 above, these terms and conditions do not exclude, restrict or modify the application of any condition, warranty, guarantee, right or remedy conferred by or implied under any provision of the Australian Consumer Law or any other statute where to do so would:

(i)contravene the relevant statute; or

(ii)cause any part of these terms and conditions to be void and/or unenforceable ("Non-Excludable Obligation").

Except in relation to Non-Excludable Obligations, all conditions, warranties and other provisions implied or conferred by statute, custom, or the general law that impose any liability or obligation on Chinese Portal are expressly excluded under these terms and conditions.

19. Non-Excludable Obligations (for Australian users)

In relation to Non-Excludable Obligations (other than a guarantee as to title, encumbrances or quiet possession conferred by the Australian Consumer Law), except for goods or services of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use or consumption (in respect of which our liability is not so limited under these terms and conditions), Chinese Portal's liability to you for a failure to comply with any Non-Excludable Obligation is limited to:

(i)in the case of services, the lowest of the cost of supplying the services again and payment of the cost of having the services supplied again; and

(ii)in the case of goods, the lowest of the cost of replacing the goods, supplying equivalent goods or having the goods repaired, or payment of the cost of replacing the goods, supplying equivalent goods or having the goods repaired.

Privacy policy

This is the main privacy policy for www.chineseportal.net and for certain services provided through these and other Chinese Portal websites and applications ("our sites") by Phoenix Metro Media Ltd.

At Chinese Portal we collect different types of information about our users for four main reasons:

1.To provide personalised services unique to individual users.

2.To help us to monitor and improve the services we offer

3.To sell advertising space on the site. This helps us to keep the site free for people who visit it.

4.If we have permission from the user, to market services to them.

There may be other privacy policies that apply to certain services we provide. Please read these when you register or subscribe for these services on these sites.

Our principles

1. We do our very best to protect your privacy by using security technology appropriately. This means:

•we make sure that we have appropriate security measures to protect your information; and

•we make sure that when we ask another organisation to provide a service for us, they have appropriate security measures.

2. We will respect your privacy. You should receive marketing emails only from us and, if you agree, from other organisations we have carefully chosen. We will make sure it is clear when you can make these choices, for example, we have boxes you need to tick if you want to receive marketing. However, we may email you occasionally with information or questions about your registration, your subscription account or postings, for example, with reminders, warnings or copyright requests.

3. We will collect and use individual user details only if we have your permission or we have sensible business reasons for doing so, such as collecting enough information to manage subscriptions.

4. We will be clear in our dealings with you as to what information about you we will collect and how we will use it.

5. We will use personal information only for the purposes for which it was originally collected and we will make sure we delete it securely.

6. Our site is accessible via the internet. This means that people around the world who access our website can see anything you post on the website, for example, comments about an article.

7. If we or our service providers transfer any information out of the European Economic Area (EEA), it will only be done with the relevant protection (stated under UK law) being in place.

How we use your information

We collect information on you:

•when you register or become a member of the Chinese Portal

•when you use the website

•through cookies

•if you choose to reveal information in postings, and

•when you enter sales promotions and competitions.

Certain services that we provide may involve us collecting extra information (Membership, for example), such as where you are, so the service can be provided as designed. This may also apply to certain apps that you download, or which we provide.

Registration

The minimum information we need to register you is your name, username, email address and a password. We will ask you more questions for different services, including sales promotions. Unless we say otherwise, you have to answer all the registration questions.

We may also ask some other, voluntary questions during registration for certain services (for example, professional networks) so we can gain a clearer understanding of who you are. This also allows us to personalise services for you.

After you have registered, we may send you emails we think may interest you. At any time you can decide not to receive these emails and will be able to 'unsubscribe'.

Logging in using social networking credentials

If you log-in to our sites using a Facebook log-in, you are granting permission to Facebook to share your user details with us. This will include your name, email address, date of birth and location which will then be used to form a Chinese Portal identity. You can also use your picture from Facebook as part of your profile. This will also allow us and Facebook to share your, networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Facebook account settings. If you remove the Chinese Portal app from your Facebook settings, we will no longer have access to this information.

If you log-in to our sites using a twitter log-in, we receive your avatar (the small picture that appears next to your tweets) and twitter username.

Use of children's data

Except for Chinese Portal students, we do not knowingly collect or store any personal information about children under the age of 16. However, they need parental permission to join. We do not display personal information about children on the site, and we read through all contributions before they are published.

Updating your personal information

We offer a 'My Space' page and a ‘Friends’ section, where you can update your personal information at any time, network with other users and change your marketing preferences. You can get to this page from most pages on the site – simply click on the 'My Space' link at the top of the screen when you are signed in.

Who we share data with

We will not share your personal information with others for marketing purposes unless you have given us your permission. If we have your permission, we will share your information only with other organisations we have chosen carefully.

If you are a Chinese Portal Member and attend an event organised by an event partner, data may be shared for event administration purposes.

We may make other organisations' services available through our sites, although we are not necessarily operating these sites. We process any information which we collect when you access a service provided by another organisation under this privacy policy. Information these other organisations collect is governed by their own privacy policies.

We can access and release personal information to keep to relevant laws and government requests, to operate our systems properly and to protect both us and our users.

Any other organisations who access your information in the course of providing services on our behalf will be governed by strict contractual restrictions to make sure that they protect your information and keep to data-protection and privacy laws which apply. We may also independently audit these service providers to make sure that they meet our standards. We may use service providers to help us run these sites (or services available on the sites), some of whom may be based outside the EEA.

Some of our webpages use plug-ins from other organisations (such as the 'Facebook Recommend' function). These other organisations may use information about your visit to our websites on their pages. If you browse these pages while still also logged in to your account with us, information they collect may be connected to your account on their site. For more information on how these organisations use information, please read their privacy policies.

Use of Cookies

We use cookies for a number of reasons.

1. For statistical purposes to track how many users we have and how often they visit our websites. We collect information listing which of our pages are most frequently visited, and by which types of users and from which countries.

2. We use other organisations to collect anonymous user information, sometimes through cookies and web beacons,(information embedded in images which allow them to analyse how the website is being used and the number of visitors).

3. We and other advertisers may use statistical cookies to track who has seen an advert and clicked on it. You can find more information on this in the online behavioural advertising section of this privacy policy.

4 Placing cookies on your computer means we can show you adverts that you might be interested in, and allows us to control the number of times you see them and measure how effective the ad campaign has been. Advertising helps us to keep the site free for you to use.

5. We may use 'Flash' cookies to store your preferences for your media player (for example, volume and so on). If we don't use them, you may not be able to watch some video content.

You can turn cookies off but if you do this, you may not be able to use all services on our websites and you might see more pop-ups and other advertising. This is because we won't be able to limit what you see by using cookies. However, you will still be able to see our editorial content.

6. We or other companies may use cookies to suggest and deliver content which we believe may interest you.

By using the sites you are agreeing to the use of cookies as described.

Other Advertising

Our sites contain links to other websites from which we may earn revenue. Our articles are never influenced by advertisers or affiliates, nor are they written for the purpose of promoting a product, except when clearly branded as a 'sponsored feature', 'advertisement feature' or 'sponsor's content'.

Legal information and how to contact us

Under the UK Data Protection Act 1998 we have to say who the 'data controller' is for www.chineseportal.net and services provided through our websites. The data controller is the organisation responsible for protecting information and, in our case, is Chinese Portal, Rockstar Hub, 3 Minster Court, Mincing Lane, London EC3R 7DD.

If you would like a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or have any questions about how we may use it, please contact the Data Protection Manager at the address shown above. Or, email info@chineseportal.net.

Changes to the privacy policy

Should we elect to change our privacy policy we will post the changes here. Where the changes are significant, we may also choose to email all our registered users with the new details. Where required by law, will we obtain your consent to make these changes.